'This Scholarly, Brilliantly Witty, Crotchety Book'

For their thirtieth-anniversary issue in 1961, the editors of The American Scholar asked sixty-three writers and critics to name some of the outstanding books published since 1931. The response by the American poet Phyllis McGinley (1905-78) is memorable: 

“I do not apologize for the curious book in which I have taken the most pleasure during the last decade—Ronald Knox’s sole masterpiece, Enthusiasm.”

 

Knox’s subtitle is A Chapter in the History of Religion (1950). His subject, he admits, is “elusive,” and his title amounts to “a cant term, pejorative, and commonly misapplied, as a label for a tendency.” Knox (1888-1957) refers to the schismatic nature of belief in the context of Roman Catholicism – the always disturbing, often fruitful friction between “the charismatic and the institutional.” The subject has applications far beyond Christianity. McGinley writes:

 

“Supposedly it is a history of Christian heresies and on that basis it is superb. But I find it something more important. It is also a history of recurrent patterns of the human mind, as applicable to literature, politics and government as to religion.”

 

Knox’s own religious history is telling. He was ordained an Anglican priest in 1912, converted to Roman Catholicism five years later, and was ordained a priest in that faith in 1918. As such, he might be presumed a disapproving chronicler of “enthusiasts.” But something happened over the 30 years Knox worked on Enthusiasm. He explains in the introduction:

 

“[W]hen the plan of this book was first conceived, all those years ago, it was to have been a broadside, a trumpet-blast, an end of controversy. . . . here, I would say, is what happens inevitably, if once the principle of Catholic unity is lost! All this confusion, this priggishness, then pedantry, this eccentricity and worse, follows directly from the rash step that takes you outside the fold of Peter!”

 

Knox then makes an admirably honest admission, one most of us would be reluctant to make, at least publicly: “[S]omehow, in the writing, my whole treatment of the subject became different; the more you got to know the men, the more human did they become, for better or worse; you were more concerned to find out why they thought as they did than to prove it was wrong.”

  

McGinley was a lifelong Roman Catholic. Her Times Three: Selected Verse from Three Decades, with Seventy New Poems (1960) was published with a foreword by W.H. Auden and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1961. A self-described “housewife poet,” McGinley dedicated Times Three to her husband and two daughters, “my critics, my champions, my copy.” Her reputation has evaporated.  If remembered at all, she is dismissed as too middlebrow and middle-class. She was a wonderful poet. At the end of her brief Knox reclamation she writes:

 

“To be acquainted with this scholarly, brilliantly witty, crotchety book is to be better acquainted with the planet and its odd occupants.”

 

[Go here and here to read McGinley’s essay “The Consolations of Illiteracy” and here to read Matthew Walther’s celebration of Ronald Knox.]